Natural Language

We use NaturalLanguage to

Communicate, one with another

Like a bridge over troubled water

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What a shame that we must pick a language (American English) in which to grow this community. It may exclude others with valuable contributions or a legitimate need. It also potentially excludes entire world-views and cultures represented by those other languages (the old LanguageLimitsThought argument).

If we did support multiple languages, I suspect that they would lead to independent communities bridged only by those polyglots with the will to forge links between them.

Can automatic translation help yet?

-- JeffMantei

As one of those polyglots which could bridge the English, Spanish and Portuguese communities, I must confess I don't think it could work out well... The tendency of grouping "us" vs. "them" is too strong in our minds... Automatic translators do a very poor work as of today, there are a lot of contextual decisions and personal insight in Wiki to be properly translated... Fortunately enough, our (presumably) group common technical background (whether in Sciences or Engineerings) will have exposed all us to the English language, so the number of lost contributions is mitigated... -- DavidDeLis

So lets all agree on one language... .e'osai ko sarji la lojban. (See LojbanLanguage.)

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I had to work in a country with a language different from English - yet I found all the highly trained and technical types were proficient in the use of English as a second language. They considered this part of the training necessary for participation in the technological explosion which has occurred in the past 25 years (the number could be 50, 10 or 5 depending on the particular branch of technology).

Participants in an ongoing dialog within a particular discipline, contribute meaningfully only if familiar with the language and practice used by the majority of the participants, whether it be English, Spanish, French, German, C++, C#, Smalltalk, or Tcl.

Hmm, maybe I should try to learn C one of these days. :-)

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"Can automatic translation work yet?" I hope it can soon. http://www.zorrozaurre.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/English/OpenTranslate -- RobertAlcock

See also WikiTranslator

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We would like to use NaturalLanguage to Speak to Computers

• http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/html/natlang.html

The value to our society of being able to communicate with computers in everyday "natural" language cannot be overstated. Imagine asking your computer "Does this candidate have a good record on the environment?" or "When is the next televised National League baseball game?" Or being able to tell your PC "Please format my homework the way my English professor likes it."

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Internet sites dealing with the subject:

• http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/%7Ebrd/Teaching/AI/Lectures/Summaries/natlang.html

To understand something is to transform it from one representation into another, where this latter representation is chosen to correspond to a set of available actions that could be performed, and for which a mapping is designed so that for each event an appropriate action will be performed.

NaturalLanguageUnderstandingSystems

• http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/%7Ebrd/Teaching/AI/Lectures/Summaries/natlang.html#Natural%20Language%20Understanding%20Systems

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Speech

Since speech is our most natural form of communication, using spoken language to access computers has long been an important research goal.

• Originally, in the 1960's, research was done on isolated word recognition before the later development of speech understanding systems. A physical problem with such systems is noise. Microphone and background noise can cause interference with the recording of the spoken utterance. Another problem is that the speaker doesn't always pronounce the same word in the same way. Sometimes whole syllables are dropped or "swallowed" at word boundaries. In fact, finding the boundaries between words in a connected-speech signal is one of the difficult problems in speech understanding. With increased information available to the hearer beyond the acoustic signal (such as context), expectations about the content can be formed.

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Processing

• http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/916/UIR001229ontology/

The ultimate goal of NLP is to determine a system of symbols, relations, and conceptual information that can be used by computer logic to implement artificial language interpretation.

NaturalLanguageProcessing has its roots in semiotics, the study of signs. Semiotics was developed by CharlesSandersPeirce (a logician and philosopher) and FerdinanddeSaussure? (a linguist). Semiotics is broken up into three branches: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.